Andrew Gelman and Kaiser Fung in American Scientist:

The nonfiction publishing phenomenon known as Freakonomics has passed its sixth anniversary. The original book, which used ideas from statistics and economics to explore real-world problems, was an instant bestseller. By 2011, it had sold...

From The Economist:

Dr DePinho is the new president of the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, Texas. (He took over in September, having previously headed the Belfer Institute, part of Harvard’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.) Mindful of his adopted city’s most famous scientific role, as...

Howard Reich in the Chicago Tribune:

No musical genre goes away entirely. The devout still sing Gregorian chant — among the oldest known written scores — in select cathedrals. Guillaume de Machaut's 14th century motets turn up in performances of early music groups. Operettas by Franz...

Pico Iyer in The New York Times:

ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived,...

From The Guardian:

We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures. We watch our backs, weigh the odds, pack an umbrella. But both neuroscience and social science suggest that we are more optimistic than realistic. On average, we expect things to turn out better than they wind up being....